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This chapter introduces and amplifies my broader and deeper perspective of demographics. It presents the layout and chapter sequence with a few sentences on the highlights, including key issues discussed, major take-aways, and challenges to the conventional perspective. It should encourage some readers to go to specific chapters for a deeper dive if they wished to read outside of the sequenced layout of the book.

This book summarises my views and research from a new angle on the subject area of demographics. When I first embarked on the initial stages of my research in this area in the millennium year 2000, I often heard interpretations of demographics related to age, youth, numbers of old, and numbers of very old. My inquisitiveness led me to delve deeper into the subject area to the etymology (word origin) of the term demographics. Its Greek origins stem from demos, which means “people”, and graphos, which means “characteristics”. My mind questioned the fact that if demographics pertained to people characteristics, how are the people characteristics within the subjects of economics and largely restricted to age only or the number of people only? As geography a macroeconomist, my view of “people characteristics” was, importantly, “people as consumers consuming goods and services” and also “people as workers producing goods and services”. This broader definition is not dependent only on age or numbers of young people.